With 325 million subscribers, Bharti Airtel is the world’s third largest mobile network operator in the world. They operate in more than 19 countries worldwide and recent launch in Africa continent has taken them to this feat. They launched their 4G services in India and they have coverage of 4G LTE in India in 18 circles. They are facing a stiff competition from Reliance Jio, the latest entrant with direct & only offering 4G services. Moving on, Airtel will be one among the five cellular service provider to come up with 5G network.

Airtel 5G Launch Date

Airtel 5G release date in India

At GTI Summit 2016 held at Mobile World Congress [MWC 2016] in the city of Barcelona, Spain, five global telecom operators agreed to make an investment in 5G technology. Sunil Bharti Mittal on behalf of Bharti Enterprises confirmed commitment to Global TD-LTE Initiative[GTI 2.0]. Joined with China Mobile, Vodafone, SoftBank, KT are the other participating mobile networks.

Through GTI 2.0, the focus will be on bring the 5G network within next three to five years. Currently, GTI 2.0 program is more focused on expanding TD-LTE services in many parts of the world. The plan is to bring undivided 5G standards, which will provide room for network expansion opportunities.

Tentative Airtel 5G launch in India could happen in 2018-2019. It will be first out for testing basis in a remote location. We expected pre-release date in India very soon.

Airtel VoLTE Launch

Currently the company is trying to deploy the VoLTE network and testing is going in 5 Indian cities. Company will start their services by the end of the year and will become the second mobile operator in India to do so after Reliance Jio.

Airtel 5G Launch Date : 2019

Airtel 5G Network

Network speed, Network Settings, Deployment

As of now, Airtel is busy in expanding 4G services to towns and villages in India. Even Airtel 4G is just available in limited locations across major cities and towns. You can check for Airtel 4G availability by going through the official list of towns with 4G coverage. So the work for 5G by Airtel services has not even begun.

Currently, there are no 5G standards mentioned, they are in work.

Competition is 5G network deployment is strong as Nokia is helping BSNL to deploy 5G. Nokia is helping BSNL to bring up 5G services in India.

Airtel 5G Speed

The Airtel 4G uses TD-LTE technology with 2300 MHz spectrum. However, Airtel has started deploying the 4G services in various cities using the FDD-LTE technology i.e., the 1800 MHz spectrum.

With the proposed 5G network, Airtel has plans to have higher capacity than 4G. This will empower telecom operators to accommodate a larger number of broadband users per unit.

The Airtel Speed on 5G network will touch to 3.6 Gbps which is 30 times than the current Airtel 4G speed.

Airtel 5G Features

In 2010, all those operators which have chosen to come up with 5G include fascinating features. All 5G providers will provide advanced features like –

Data rates of 100 Mbps per second in cities and towns

Improved coverage

Enhanced signal efficiency

Allowing maximum numbers of connections simultaneously

Low power consumption

Higher number of broadband users per unit

Less number of towers and low battery consumption

That should make 5G as the upcoming telecom revolution and Airtel wants to be the front-runner in India and other countries where it operates.

Airtel 5G Plans

Initially, the Airtel 5G data plans will be costlier but as the network coverage expands the price will come down. And competition from other 5G network providers like Vodafone 5G, Reliance Jio 5G, Aircel, Tata DoCoMo will still bring down the prices. And the data recharge will be done in the same way as we are doing it right now.

There will be two different sets of plans to be made available. They are –

5G postpaid plans with myInfinity and myfamily plan

5G Prepaid plans

Apart from normal plans, there will be also full unlimited plans too.

Airtel 5G Phone

Airtel has also planned to unveil an Airtel 5G smartphone, just like how they unveiled Airtel 4G smartphone in 2017.